In his rapid response press release, issued the same day as the 137 page regulation that I doubt he or anyone on his staff has read, Sen. Reid says, "The agency (EPA) decided just how much radiation you and I can live with." That is not at all what is in the regulation. Instead, the dose limits set in the regulation are for a precisely defined hypothetical individual living at a point 11 miles from the proposed repository who might consume water contaminated by radionuclides that migrate and mix with the groundwater that is accessible to him (and yes, it is a male) thousands of years from now. The dose limit is about the same as a chest x-ray for the period through 10,000 years from repository closure and for the period following through one million years the dose limit is the same as it presently is for the public anywhere in the U.S. It also is one-fifth of the limit a nuclear worker is allowed to be exposed to.
The senator is exposed to about the same level of radiation on a round-trip by plane to Washington DC as the dose limit for the first 10,000 years set in the EPA reg.

Whoa! Your reporter is mischaracterizing what the EPA has been doing on attempting to issue a radiation standard for the repository proposed for Yucca Mountain. You say the "EPA allowed more cancer deaths in the future" but the courts "tossed out the cancer limits in 2005."
First of all, the regulation set limits for radiation dose to be measured at a specific point in Amargosa Valley for a surrogate individual. The limit is so many (15) millirems per year.
The article must be referring to the remand by the federal court in 2004 to revise the regulation to be "based on and consistent with" the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences as regards to the PERIOD of regulatory requirements to the period of peak dose, which is hundreds of thousands of years-- well beyond the 10,000 years EPA had proposed. The court ruling says NOTHING about "cancer limits." Indeed, you will find quite a bit of disagreement among health physicists about the relationship between latent cancer fatalities and low doses (as expected at Yucca.)
The article is lazily written or edited to refer to EPA promising a rewrite of "cancer regulations" by 2006.

You say,"Every year the Bush administration requests vast sums for its Energy Department to continue developing the dump." Let's do a little fact-check on that.
In FY 2008, the nuclear utilities and their ratepayers, will pay approximately $750 million to the government for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel from their reactors. Congress appropriated $187 million of that amount to the repository program and SPENDS THE REST on other programs. Oh, yes, the Defense budget included $199 million for its share of the program cost.
By what measure is $386 million a "vast sum" even if the full $494 million that the Bush administration requested had been appropriated?

The "Democratic controlled" House Subcommittee that votes on the Yucca budget, referred to in the first comment, is actually quite bi-partisan on the repository program.
The Senate has a miserable record on even passing its appropriations bills. In FY 2008-- the present year-- the program absorbed a 22 percent cut in a non-transparent manuever attributed to Sen. Reid in the gigantic, omnibus appropriations act.

"Fast track?" By what standard do you consider that the development of the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain is on a fast track?
Congress set the goal in 1982 of initial emplacement in a repository beginning in 1998 and required all nuclear reactor owners to enter into contracts based on that with the federal government (DOE) and to begin fee payments for the disposal by June 1983. The payments begun on time and continue to this day, even though the earliest repository opening is 2017 and more likely 2020.
At one point, following the 2002 approval of the site by Congress, DOE had said the license application would be submitted by 2004, then 2005 and finally June 2008.
Three or even four years to review this important license, with all of its complexities is a long time. A freshman entering this fall may expect to graduate before the NRC completes this "fast-tracked" license review.